For decades, college students have been exploited by publishers of introductory textbooks. The publishers charge about $200 for a textbook, and then every 3-4 years they make some minor cosmetic changes, reorder some of the problems, add a few new problems, and call it a “new edition”. They then take the previous edition out of print. The purpose, of course, is to destroy the used book market and to continue charging students exorbitant amounts of money.

Now, I usually think of myself as a socialist, so it's a little uncomfortable for me to be defending capitalism, but here goes.

Large textbooks publishing companies are usually listed on the major stock exchanges so their balance sheets are readily available to those who want to look. The industry is competitive. The profit margins are almost certainly within the range you might expect for such companies. Some of these companies lose money and some have gone bankrupt or been bought up by competitors. It's unreasonable to assume that textbook publishing companies are making huge excess profits by gouging students. It's unreasonable to assume that they are charging "exorbitant" amounts of money. It's downright stupid to imply that any company has a monopoly of introductory physics textbooks, or introductory biochemistry textbooks.

My textbook is on a five year cycle (approximately). The publisher (Pearson/Prentice Hall) has never pressured me to produce a new edition—it's always been the author's call. The last edition of my book (5th) was published last August and I worked on it for two years devoting about 50% of my time to that task. The changes in the new edition were not just "minor cosmetic changes" and adding new problems was not a motive.2

The changes in my book were necessary because of new information and new technologies that have to be incorporated and new perspectives on fundamental principles and concepts that need to be taken into account. Some material was deleted. I also took note of new ways of presenting information and tried to make the book more appealing to students.

Yes, it's true that I will make more money on royalties with a new edition and it's true that the publisher will make a few percent profit on new sales. That's a nice side benefit but the main motivation for authors is to make a better textbook, something that I can continue to be proud of.

Let's think about the cost of a textbook. My book sells on Amazon.com for $140.56. It's probably more expensive in university bookstores but I can't confirm that because my university bookstore doesn't carry my book.

You can find copies of my book online at other bookstores for about $100 plus shipping and handling. That gives you a clue about the wholesale price—the price charged by the publishers. Let's assume that it's $100. The difference between this wholesale price and the retail price is money that goes to the retailers, not the publishers. This is just common sense. Anyone who understands how the capitalist system works should be able to figure this out.3

Let's assume that a typical high quality textbook for an introductory course sells for $100 when you buy it wholesale from the publisher. Let's assume that the publisher makes about 5% profit—probably too high, but it will do for my purpose. That means that it costs about $95 to produce the textbook and pay royalties to the authors.

How are you going to make cheaper textbooks for students? This is where a nonprofit group called OpenStax College enters the picture. This organization is distributing free high quality textbooks online. If you want to buy a copy, they will only charge what it costs to produce it (about $40). What about the other costs that make up the difference between the production costs of a major for-profit company and OpenStax College (95 - 40 = $55)? Who pays for that if it's not the students?

Bill & Melinda Gates, William & Flora Hewlett, and several others pay for it, according to the OpenStax College website.

Are you asking yourself, “Hey, what’s the catch?” There is actually no catch. We are a nonprofit organization supported by a bunch of really big foundations that are tired of the status quo for textbooks in higher education. These foundations, with the support of a dedicated team of professionals and community folks just like you, have come together to make a suite of really great, very free textbooks.

Isn't that cool? A bunch of nonprofit foundations are going to cover the cost of textbooks. Presumably, all the people responsible for producing the book (authors, artists, editors, scientific reviewers, proofreaders, administrators, permission researchers, website developers, systems managers etc.) are still going to be paid decent wages. The only losers are the students who work in the bookstores, the truck drivers, and a few shareholders.

What could possibly go wrong? As Marc Sher says, ...

The monopoly may be ending, and students could save billions of dollars. For decades, the outrageous practices of textbook publishers have not been challenged by serious competition. This is serious competition. OpenStax College as a nonprofit and foundation supported entity does not have a sales force, so word of mouth is the way to go: Tell everyone!

1. It's worth keeping in mind that the parent company of Discover is a for-profit company.

2. I spend hours and hours on the problem & solutions but, quite frankly, I never use them when I'm teaching and neither do most of my colleagues.

3. Are you surprised that your university bookstore has such a mark-up? Why? Did you think that all those people working in the bookstore were volunteers? Did you think that the electricity companies and gas companies donated free electricity and gas to the bookstore? Did you think that all the repairs and maintenance to the bookstore were done by public-spirited workers who donated their time in the evenings and on weekends? Did you think that university bookstores don't have to pay taxes? And what about the truck drivers who delivered the textbooks? Did you think they were independently wealthy men and women who were just doing this as a hobby and didn't have to worry about supporting their families?

OpenStax isn't the only low/no cost textbook attempt out there; wikipedia has a similar initiative to produce free e-textbooks. I cannot speak to the quality of the wikibooks attempt in my own field, as the "book" is essentially an outline at this point, but a minimal reading of a completed book (i.e. human physiology) pints a picture of detailed, but often poorly-written and poorly-illustrated texts.

Part of me hopes that one of these models may be successful - not because I'm anti-capitalism, but rather because of the limited options in many fields. In my field (Immunology) there are two main options for undergrad texts; both a pricey (although, as Larry points out, probably not over-priced), and both retain the 1980s-esque bias towards the adaptive component of immunity, leaving an instructor trying to teach a balanced view of the immune system (i.e. myself) in a bit of a pickle. At least with wikibooks you can generate a "custom" book containing those sections you want - potentially created a better book for a particular course.

There is no question that the publishing field is undergoing a lot of change - I hope when things settle that we're in a better place...

That is actually very typical of socialists. They are socialists with other peoples' money and capitalists when it comes to their self-interests

Why is that relevant? I'd be delighted if the American government would nationalize a major textbook publishing company and give away all their textbooks for free, provided, of course, that it's my publisher that stays in business! :-)

Would you be similarly delighted to find out that your publisher stayed in business but decided not to offer remuneration to the authors? (I have not been in your position, so it's only a guess but, personally, I think/hope that I would.)

No, that's not what I meant at all. What I meant was that you have to understand how the system works before you can offer valid criticism.

Marc Sher demonstrates a remarkable ignorance about how publishing companies work and I thought it was necessary to correct his naive misconceptions even though I'd prefer another system.

I'd love to live in a society where you, as a taxpayer, gave science writers a decent salary (and expenses) to write free textbooks for students. I'd also like you to pay the salaries of all the workers who contribute to the production of those books and all the workers who distribute them and advertise their existence.

Judging by the tone of your criticism, you'd be more than willing to pay more taxes to help out the students, right?

Ergo - Canadian taxpayers gave you a decent salary to write textbooks. Only thing is, they end up paying twice for them.

The situation is much more complicated than you imagine and I really don't want to get into a discussion about my personal finances. However, it's not true that professors who choose to focus on pedagogy are going to get the same salary and salary increases as those who run research labs.

Furthermore, there are considerable expenses associated with writing textbooks and the university does not pay for any of those. I need another source of income or the money will come out of my salary. Like every other professor, I need office furniture, computers, printers, supplies, software, journal subscriptions, and trips to conferences and meetings. Usually you can pay for those out of a research grant—the university certainly doesn't cover those expenses.

But people like me have other expenses as well. For example, I spend more than $1500 per year on textbooks and other books. (One reason why I wish textbooks were cheaper!)

With rare exceptions, you cannot make a living writing textbooks. Carl Zimmer will confirm this.

But why pick on me? There are thousands of professors who make tons of money consulting and even owning their own companies. English professors publish best-selling novels, history professors write trade books about history, music professors perform at major concerts. art professors sell things, chemistry professors own lucrative patents. And let's not even think about professors in business schools, or law professors.

I am not picking on you. I've said it before in comments here and I only repeat it now - all these thousands of professors should not be charging taxpayers twice and trice. The only reason this system exists is because universities are run by professors for the benefit of professors.

Now, I usually think of myself as a socialist, so it's a little uncomfortable for me to be defending capitalism, but here goes.

I don't think of them as being mutually exclusive.

It's possible to have a robust capitalist economic system running under the auspices of a democratic government, positioned somewhere between a centrally planned economy and laissez-faire free enterprise.

I seem to have engaged in free textbook publication, more or less inadvertently. For many years I have taught a course in theoretical population genetics. Starting in the mid-1970s I distributed my own notes. These got updated and have become a textbook "Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics". The latest version is over 400 pages long, and that is with large-format pages that have lots of stuff per page. I have had offers from publishers, but have put them off as the book is still incomplete. But its PDF can be downloaded for free ("free as in free beer").

At this stage I am kept from moving to publication by two thoughts: (1) The whole field of theoretical population genetics is so small, so few courses are taught on this worldwide, that a printed book would sell rather few copies per year (I'd guess maybe 50) and the royalties from it would not be much, and (2) I keep in mind the impoverished student in some distant place in the world who can download my book and use it, but might be unable to pay for it as a printed book.

So I am very noble right now. However for my other book "Inferring Phylogenies" it sells well enough that all thoughts of virtue recede from view -- my family needs the money.

It's surprising that people seem to think that college textbooks write themselves, so the cost of a textbook should be the cost of printing it. (This is akin to the people who discover that Apple only pays some large fraction of the price of an iPhone for the parts, so the rest must be profit -- because all the people who engineered it, wrote the operating system, assemble it, sell it, provide technical support, liaise with the phone companies, advertise, and otherwise contribute work are magical pixies who do their work for free.)

If you think about it, a textbook is going to be more expensive than most other books. A novelist can produce a novel entirely out of imagination (and gin, according to some novelists' comments), but a good textbook needs all kinds of research and fact checking, and if the text is going to be relevant, the author had better have some significant experience with the subject matter. Every page of a novel doesn't have to be brilliant, but every page of a textbook had better have at least a certain minimum level of quality. A novelist can write terrible prose, but a textbook writer has to be understood by students and teachers, who can be surprisingly dense (especially the teachers).

And, also if you think of it, a textbook has a restricted audience (specialized textbooks extremely so), and the more specialized and high-level the book, the fewer people will have any use for it. So not only will the total cost be high, but each purchaser will represent a bigger chunk of the cost.

It's mostly because they think that textbook publishers are making enormous profits AND because they don't think textbooks are providing value for their money. Schools are "making" students buy textbooks and they would rather spend that money on something else that's more fun.

In the case of iPods, iPhones and iPads, they probably think that Apple is making huge profits but they are still happy to buy the products because they're very useful.

Suppose close competition trimmed margins a lot. Your book's publisher said to you that bookstores were hesitant to stock your book because of its high cost to them, so your publisher had to lower the cost of the book. Your publisher then said sorry, that means $3 per book royalty instead of $10 per book.

I can't speak for Mr. Moran, but depending on the subject, I'd say yes -- and, furthermore, that the loss would probably be society-in-general's, not the author's.

You are coming across as though you think textbook authors live a life of leisure and the royalties from the textbooks go into a fund which they use to tip the cabana boys who bring them drinks as they lounge around pools at tropical resorts, or at least towards similarly frivolous purposes.

There are some subjects where that may be true. I had a math professor in college -- a very nice guy, actually -- who had a side job as an actuarial consultant to insurance companies. He said it paid wonderfully. All the texts we used in that class were spiral-bound materials he wrote himself and had published at a local print shop. If he got any royalties from the texts -- which is doubtful, because they were cheap -- he certainly didn't need them, and it's not like he had to write new editions ever again (unless he wanted to add extra topics).

A medical or biological textbook, on the other hand, needs to be written by someone who understands the subject. That means they're doing a lot of reading and probably engaged in research themselves. The salary of a professor of biology tends not to be as high as you might like to think -- the average is certainly lower than that of (say) a surgeon. The royalties not only keep the author alive but allow them to keep up with research. Cutting the royalties means discouraging the authors from writing an up-to-date book.

Or would you prefer that doctors and researchers get trained using out-of-date materials? That's where the cost to society shows up.

Oh, and at the risk of seeming to monopolize the thread, a reply to Anonymous as well:

"Well yeah, of course there's a lot of costs in producing and selling textbooks. But lots of things have a lot of costs and are sold at a loss nevertheless."

Except for print-on-demand (which is always more expensive), the cost of creating a book is inversely related to the size of the print run. (That is, the costs of writing the book and advertising it and so forth are basically fixed and get divided across the whole run, while the price for materials and printing and assembly are basically fixed per copy.) Textbooks tend to be printed in much smaller runs than mass-market books, so the price is going to be higher than a novel.

And who are you asking to take a loss?

The authors, who probably use that money to live on while they keep up with the subject so that the book can be kept up to date? If they're supposed to take a loss, it's going to mean most textbooks are very badly written and may contain faulty information.

The publishers, who are likely to discontinue their textbook arm entirely if it isn't profitable enough? They could switch over to fiction without losing their investment and lose practically nothing, or switch to non-book printing and still keep most of their machinery. (And, as pointed out in the post, the profits on textbook publishing for the publishers are substantially smaller than for many industries. I'm told that newspapers are considered to be failing if they don't turn at least a 10% profit.)

Or the college bookstores, which would generally translate into worse service, fewer student jobs on campus, and a generally worse situation for students?

"Do you think the bookstores would be able to charge a high markup if they had competition? Pricing is not (entirely) about covering costs."

Bookstores do have competition. Or do you think the publishers deliberately keep their academic stuff off Amazon? (If so, you're reaching into delusional conspiracy theory territory.)

Not to mention there is an opportunity cost for the author. The time spent on writing a textbook could be time spent writing a gran for summer salary or time with family/friends or advocating for higher pay for professors. Wanting to make sure the author(a worker) is paid is not antisocialism.

What I see elevating the cost for many textbooks is the inclusion of online course materials that require an access code. So for instance, "Pearson" has the "mastering biology" website and sells new biology textbooks with an access code to this website. When you purchase a used biology textbook, or even rent a textbook online you also have to buy a new access code.

So from a capitalist standpoint, this is a brilliant move because it is a great source of reoccurring revenue. From a used textbook standpoint, its a bummer because it keeps the textbook price elevated. BTW, I run a used textbook price comparison website, finderscheapers.com, and track these things rather closely.

Would your position on open distribution change if your University's infrastructure actively encouraged textbook authorship, through the form of salary increase or other amenities to deal with the workload of composing the material?

I mean, from a mathematics point of view:

The intellectual labor costs must be some finite number, decided upon prior to providing the service.

By definition, that means that the fixed cost to the publisher (of obtaining the scholar's work) cannot factor in the actual amount of books sold over the "product lifetime".

Assuming we talk about "ebooks", once the initial cost of digitizing is fulfilled, the cost of distribution is vanishingly small, so there are no terms dependent on the number of books actually sold.

This leaves at least one free variable:

How much do you think an author should be paid for the digital re-distribution of their work, on a per-book basis? Does this number change with other variables, and, if so, what are they?

Of course, this is all an economic argument, and as such, we run the risk of repeating such pseudo-pragmatism as the kind you outlined recently in "Advice for High School Graduates".

Education can't be summed up easily in a basic cost-benefit scheme, not should it be, which brings me to my next question:

Supposing your institution provided equivalent financial compensation as your publisher, and gave access to a digitizing process that allowed you to create a virtual textbook for "friction-less sharing", at what price per unit (if non-zero) would you be comfortable distributing the text in such an infrastructure?

----------------------------------------

Also, if the problem sets aren't being utilized by professors in the classroom, why do you continue to include them? Are they designed to reach non-academic demographics?

[This isn't supposed to read like an inquisition; but your openness to public discourse on the matter invites questions that normally go unanswered in the larger debate. It's also somewhat difficult to define tone in a limited medium]

Would your position on open distribution change if your University's infrastructure actively encouraged textbook authorship, through the form of salary increase or other amenities to deal with the workload of composing the material?

Yes, definitely. But it doesn't have to be the university who pays. As we see with OpenStax College, it's also possible to get rich people to pay. (Is that stable funding?) Problem is, we need several such nonprofits with competing textbooks on the same subject because no single physics textbook is going to satisfy all teachers.

Supposing your institution provided equivalent financial compensation as your publisher, and gave access to a digitizing process that allowed you to create a virtual textbook for "friction-less sharing", at what price per unit (if non-zero) would you be comfortable distributing the text in such an infrastructure?

This is not an easy question to answer. Let's assume that the latest edition of my textbook cost me $400,000 to produce a digital version that was ready for the printer. (I'd have to pay people for editing, figures, drawings, photographs, layout/composition, scientific reviews and administrative assistance over a two year period. That comes to about $300,000 and supplies and other expenses come to about $100,000.) Let's assume that the ongoing price of maintaining the servers and the websites and the accounting were about $500,000 over next five years. Let's assume that you still have to have sales people to promote the book and make presentations to textbook adoption committees all over the world. You still have to pay for advertising or nobody will even know you wrote a book. That part is difficult to estimate but let's peg it at $500,000 over five years.

The total comes to $1,400,000 per edition but that's probably a lowball estimate. If you could sell 50,000 copies then you'd have to charge $28 for each electronic version just to break even.

Also, if the problem sets aren't being utilized by professors in the classroom, why do you continue to include them? Are they designed to reach non-academic demographics?

I don't use them but there are many other professors who use them. It's one of those things that you can't change because so many teachers expect to see them in the book even if they only use them for inspiration.

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Principles of Biochemistry 5th edition

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Superstition

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerlyseemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.

Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.